The Authenticity of Self: Conceptualization,Personal Experience,and Practice

Scholars across the social sciences often use the concept of authenticity to refer to such different things as sincerity, truthfulness, originality, and the feeling and practice of being true to one's self or others. Whereas the concept of authenticity refers to all of these things, a careful employment of this concept requires a clear understanding of it. By reviewing theory and empirical research on authenticity, we aim at a more precise conceptualization of authenticity. We argue that authenticity is about being true to one's self. When one is true to one's self, one experiences authenticity. This conceptualization views authenticity as a self‐reflective and emotional experience. In order to understand authenticity, a researcher must then take into consideration at least two things: people's emotional experiences of being true or untrue to one's self and people's ideas about what their true self is.     

Rethinking Role Residual: Retired Police Officers and the Inertia of Habitus

In this paper, we bring conceptual clarity to the literature on “role residual.” Based on the extant literature and our own research involving police retirees, we first delineate three empirical variants of role residual: emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. We then make the case that a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon requires a theoretical framework capable of conceptualizing role residual in a way that is consistent with a broader theory of practice. To that end, we use Bourdieu's work to argue that role residual comprises states of being or behavior that occur at the intersection of (a) schemas and dispositions inscribed in the habitus as a result of one's prior role‐specific orientation to the field, and (b) a configuration of proximate conditions in the present that is sufficiently similar to what one would have experienced while in one's prior role.     

An Academic in Practice—or—How about a Sabbatical Doing Social Work?

Abstract

The author describes a sabbatical spent doing social work in a family and children's agency. Emphasis is given to conceptualizing the evolution of practice skill from observing one's work, the enhancement of teaching competence, the opportunity for scholarly achievements and the fostering of school-agency relationships.     

Assessing the Advantages of Bilingualism for the Children of Immigrants1

This article responds to the current academic debate on the advantages of bilingualism to the children of immigrants in the United States. The author utilizes data from the 1992–1993 and 1995–1996 Children of Immi rants Longitudinal Study to estimate the effects of bilingualism on efucational outcomes. In contrast to a recent study, the author rovides conclusive evidence that there are advantages to bilingualism beyond the functional ability to communicate with one's parents. The author also provides evidence that demonstrates that bilingualism is only advantageous in those communities with low levels of English proficiency and high levels of resources and networks.     

Working Life on the Move,Domestic Life at Standstill? Work‐related Travel and Responsibility for Home and Family

Using survey data from Sweden, this article examines the implications of work‐related travel for the gendered division of household responsibility. The question is raised whether absence from home due to frequent business trips or long commuting hours might affect work travellers' relative share of managing and organizing everyday life in the domestic sphere. In the sample, a correlation was observed between an increased overnight work travel and a reduced share of responsibility at home when the work traveller was a man, whereas no such association could be detected for female work travellers. The implications of work travel for the division of domestic responsibility thus cannot be considered simply a function of available time. Instead, the outcome is affected by gender, supporting the notion that a woman's dedication to interests and obligations outside home seem to be conditioned by her ability to simultaneously live up to traditional norms of proper womanhood. Moreover, since work‐related travel is associated with higher positions and better pay, one's ability and willingness to travel may condition one's chances for professional and financial advancement, contributing to a gender‐segregated labour market with women more reluctant to embrace jobs requiring frequent travel.     

Parent Effectiveness Among Single,Low-Income,African American Mothers

Abstract

This study was an exploratory investigation of parenting effectiveness among 135 single, low-income African American mothers. Two aspects of parenting were investigated, satisfaction with one's ability to parent and parent effectiveness or abilities. Two instruments were used to measure these concepts, the Kansas Parental Satisfaction Scale (James, Schumn, Kennedy, Grigsby, Shectman, & Nichols, 1985) and the Parent Success Indicator for Parents (Strom & Strom, 1998).

Results indicate high levels of effective parenting among the group on both measures. This was true regardless of the mother's age, level of income, level of education, number of children, or age of the oldest child. Implications for social work practice, policy, and research are presented.     

The Power of Perceived Experience: Events That Shape Work as a Calling

Meaning plays an important role in many people's lives and work. A significant source of meaning derives from a greater sense of fulfilling one's calling, or purpose in work. This study examined the specific life experiences that shape people's perceptions of their calling and the characteristics of those experiences that make them so powerful. Fifty‐eight people who self‐identified as leaders responded to a questionnaire about the relevant experiences that shaped their perceptions of their work as a calling. Participants' responses were content‐analyzed to generate a taxonomy of themes in 4 overarching categories: (a) content of the event, (b) context of the event, (c) confirmation of one's call, and (d) the continuing effect that the event has had on the individual's life. By increasing knowledge about events that affect perceptions about one's calling, counselors may be more equipped to shed light on the potential, unexamined trajectories of a client's work and life.     

Community Land Trusts in the United States

ABSTRACT

Land trusts are a means to conserve land and/or wildlife (e.g., donating one's farm to The Nature Conservancy) or encourage affordable homeownership and local control of land. The topic of this article is the latter type of land trusts, called Community Land Trusts (CLTs), that have been touted as an innovative means to provide and preserve affordable housing. Through a synthesis of the literature, this article introduces social workers to CLTs. This includes defining Community Land Trusts, reporting on their brief history in the United States, discussing their advantages and disadvantages, and examining the limited empirical evidence. This review suggests that Community Land Trusts are an arena for future social work practice and research.     

Coming to Terms with Adoption

Abstract

This article focuses on the development of personal identity of adopted individuals from adolescence into adulthood. For adopted persons, identity development involves exploration of alternative futures as well as coming to terms with the facts of one's adoption. Integration of adoption into one's overall sense of identity is discussed, as is evidence about adopted persons' construction of identity from the perspective of first-person accounts, reports from clinicians, and research on identity and adoption. A conceptual scheme regarding adoptive identity development is outlined, and implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Farm Women and the Empowerment Potential in Value‐Added Agriculture

While the number of women in farming has risen in the United States, less clear is whether increasing participation in agriculture translates into empowerment. Are invisibility and disempowerment lingering expressions of farm women's experience? Using qualitative data drawn from 32 interviews with Michigan value‐added farmers, we examine the extent to which women have been able to experience empowerment, and the ways in which value‐added agriculture specifically fosters an empowering context. We adopt a conceptualization of empowerment from the development scholarship in order to establish a baseline for scrutiny, viewing empowerment as a multidimensional process constituting the “power to” realize one's goals, the opportunity to exercise “power with” others, and the ability to find and nurture “power within” the self. Our findings indicate that value‐added agriculture provides a unique context for women's empowerment. At the same time, the extent to which value added‐agriculture constitutes a venue for women's empowerment is complex, is multifaceted, and requires constant negotiation. It can be organized and performed in such a way as to subvert the empowerment process by confining women to specific social locations that may reproduce oppressive structures.     

Integrating Critical Consciousness into Direct Social Work Practice: A Pedagogical View

An unnecessary and unfortunate divide has existed historically within social work both in the United States and also in the United Kingdom between social reform or anti-oppressive practice, and direct social work practice or social care. In this article, the limitations of such a dichotomy will be explored, and ways that social work educators may more effectively integrate critical reflection approaches into their pedagogical practices will be identified. Building upon Denzin's methodological elaboration of C. Wright Mills' concept of private troubles–public issues, this article will discuss the usefulness of applying methods from critical, interpretive qualitative research to help social workers achieve critical consciousness in social work education and practice. This article will also address ways to help social work students overcome impediments to achieving critical consciousness, including the anxiety attendant upon changing one's belief systems. Finally, this article will describe the development of a concentration-year MSW elective, Transformative Social Work Practice, which sought to assist social work students in becoming more critically reflexive in their clinical work.     

The Native American Family Circle: Roots of Resiliency

SUMMARY

This paper examines the structure, values, and identity of Native families. It discusses the history and context of Native Americans and offers specific practice principles and interventions for enhancing one's work with Native people.     

Theoretical Beacons: Maturana's Theory in Clinical Practice

This paper introduces several theoretical constructs drawn from the work of Humberto Maturana that can be applied to a diverse range of clinical contexts, including supervision. These constructs are: love as a fundamental need of human beings; pathways of explanation: (Objectivity), Objectivity; Emotioning; Structural Coupling; Plasticity; Domains of Operational Coherences. These constructs assist in choosing a point of entry for specific clinical situations and form a foundation on which one's preferred model of practice can be built.     

Producing Family Problems: Organization and Uses of the Family Perspective and Rhetoric in Family Therapy

This article applies and extends literature on the micropolitics of trouble and family rhetoric perspectives by analyzing how therapists in a family therapy agency practicing the brief model used family rhetoric in defining and responding to client problems. Family rhetoric is the use of images of family (the family perspective) to (1) persuade others to one's preferred orientation to issues of mutual concern and (2) attribute identities to one's self and others. The article focuses on how the therapists rhetorically enacted and applied the family perspective in interactions with colleagues and clients to define and remedy client troubles. In general, troubles were defined and remedied by treating them as products of clients' family systems, defined as enduring roles, relationships, and perspectives. The therapists sought to remedy client troubles by initiating changes assessed as appropriate for their troubles and family systems. The article concludes by considering some of the implications of the findings and analysis for the sociological study of human service work.     

I Was a Teenage Vegan: Motivation and Maintenance of Lifestyle Movements

Recent research has pointed to the rise of socially conscious consumption and of lifestyle movements or social movements that focus on changing one's everyday lifestyle choices as a form of protest. Much of this research addresses how adults maintain socially conscious consumption practices. Using interviews with youths who are vegan—strict vegetarians who exclude all animal products from their diet and lifestyle—I isolate the factors influencing recruitment into and retention of veganism as a lifestyle movement. I show that initial recruitment requires learning, reflection, and identity work, and that subsequent retention requires two factors: social support from friends and family, and cultural tools that provide the skills and motivation to maintain lifestyle activism. I also show how participation in the punk subculture further facilitated these processes. This work contributes to studies of youth subcultures and social movements by showing how the two intersect in lifestyle movement activism.     

Resilience as Reflexivity: A New Understanding for Work with Looked-After Children

This article argues that the current model of resilience in the social work literature, through its predominant focus on outcomes and behaviours rather than the underlying processes of development involved, risks superficiality and appears to lack an underpinning psychological theory of the way in which resilience develops. In response, I propose a psychodynamic understanding of this process, which sees resilience as rooted in the capacity for reflexivity (defined here as an awareness of one's own mental state and the mental states of others), and which describes how this capacity develops. This holds that a strong-enough ego, with the capacity for resilience-as-reflexivity, is the necessary precursor of the child's ability to make use of positive experiences. This psychodynamic understanding of resilience development aims to give social workers a greater appreciation of how the mental health of children in the care system may have been affected by their experiences, and how they can be helped to develop the psychological foundations of resilience and therefore better mental health. I suggest that workers can use this understanding to assess the stage of resilience-development a child has reached, and to inform therapeutic work aimed at strengthening their resilience.     

Exploring the Role of Being Out on a Queer Person's Self-Compassion

Recent changes in societal attitudes toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities have resulted in more people openly identifying with sexual minority status. Due to research on the effects of denying one's sexual orientation and the negative effects of this, many have advocated for more openness in queer sexual orientation. Compassion means connecting to the suffering of others not by avoiding their pain but instead by identifying it so that the feeling of kindness may emerge. Self-compassion, therefore, involves being touched by and open to one's own suffering, not avoiding or disconnecting from it, generating the desire to alleviate one's suffering and to heal oneself with kindness. The purpose of the research is to understand the impact that being out has on a queer person's self-compassion. The Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) is a 26-item, 5-point Likert measure, where a higher score equated to higher self-compassion and looked at how a person showed loving kindness to one's self through the six dimensions of self-compassion. The six dimensions of self-compassion are mindfulness, over-identification, self-kindness, self-judgment, common humanity, and isolation. Results showed that those who are totally out have a higher sense of self-compassion. Implications for practitioners working with the queer population are also discussed.     

Maintaining mastery despite age related losses. The resilience narratives of two older women in need of long-term community care

The aim of this article is to examine how older people mobilise sources of strength, often denoted under the concept of resilience, to maintain mastery over their lives in the context of significant threats to their function. Departing from a relational approach to resilience, we focus on how they cooperate and interact with significant others to achieve their personal goals. This is illustrated by the narratives of two older women. The concept of resilience helps us to reflect on their stories and to gain an in-depth understanding of the mediating sources of strength older people rely on when encountering the losses associated with old age. The narratives of the women show that what on the surface appears to be a similar burden to a life or function, turned out to be interpreted and responded to in a different way. Maintaining mastery in old age is a symbolic and interactional process, and a shared responsibility for older persons and their social environment. Important mediating sources of strength that turn out to influence positively one's sense of mastery include a positive perception of one's situation, openness about one's vulnerability and responsiveness to help. In order to promote older people's sense of mastery, significant others need to approach them in a positive way, by being aware of the way support is offered, by believing in their potential and strength and by allowing reciprocity in the relationship. When these conditions are fulfilled, it becomes possible to enter into a constructive dialogue and recommendations can be developed – in terms of treatment – that are consistent with the older persons' values and expectations.     

A Test of Symbolic Interactionist Predictions About Emotions in Imagined Situations

From the perspective of symbolic interactionism, inner experiences—including emotions—are shaped culturally as individuals formulate events in words, and individual experiences are shaped socially as others contribute to the verbal formulation of one's experiences. Understanding cultural shaping and social negotiation of emotions requires understanding how emotion attributions arise from linguistic framings of events, and Affect Control Theory (ACT) offers a model of emotions that addresses this issue. We report tests of ACT predictions of emotions in 128 events against self-reported emotions of respondents imagining themselves in such situations. ACT predictions are found to correlate with self-reported emotions. Thus, empirical results validate ACT's postulate that emotions emerge from the personal impression that is generated in an event, along with the difference between that impression and the person's identity. In the conclusion, we discuss how the ACT formulation can enlighten interpretations of social negotiations regarding emotions.